POP CAPSULES

10 Years Of Rotten Punk Celebrated

It looked like an awfully patriotic crowd outside the Hollywood Palladium, with lots of teens wearing those gaudy foam Lady Liberty crowns, but on closer inspection they turned out to be those old pointy Mohawk haircuts. This was, after all, a concert advertised as a "10th anniversary of punk" show (or a "10 years too late for punk" show, for some).

It was some fireworks aimed at the stage Saturday--along with spit, beer, and other 1976-era punk missiles--that brought Public Image Ltd.'s performance to a premature halt early on. But an angry John Lydon/Rotten was persuaded to return, and his sometimes adversative relationship with the crowd (the usual mixture of the intelligentsia and the knuckleheaded) seemed to add some fire to PiL's performance that hadn't been there before the break.

He retook the stage with the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," as if to placate the masses, and followed up with some of his most Middle Eastern caterwauling, as if to then annoy them. That Johnny--after 10 years, still a pill. The band plays the Pacific Amphitheatre tonight.